It’s an advertiser and marketer’s big dream– to have a commercial play during the big game. For Tombras School of Advertising and Public Relations alumni Hayley Howell (’16) and Patrick Wells (’14), that dream came true.
The pair work in Brooklyn, New York, for Orchard Creative, a full-service advertising agency. Howell is an Account Director and Wells is a Senior Copywriter for the company. One of their clients is Etsy, a global online marketplace that connects people looking for unique goods with independent sellers around the world.
Howell said, “They [Etsy] came to us with the task of introducing their new feature ‘Gift Mode,’ an interactive hub that combines AI and human curation that can help you find the perfect gift. And they wanted to launch it on the biggest stage in advertising: the Super Bowl.”
Orchard had just finished producing Etsy’s holiday campaign when Etsy came to them with the big news.
“Super Bowl briefs are wild. You can feel the weight and pressure of them,” Wells said. “Everyone’s expecting something big—so you’re not just focused on the idea itself, but also meeting the moment. Which is something completely outside the realm of normal advertising.”
He said scripts like these are under considerable scrutiny, with plenty of eyeballs and stakeholders weighing in.
“You don’t just write one script. You write hundreds. I wrote 20+ scripts in one night at one time, and the one that won came out of that batch.”
The idea for the final script stemmed from the human fear of not knowing what to give someone as a gift after they have given you something.
Wells explained, “To meet the moment, I tried to find big stories, and eventually got to big gifts in history. I thought about the Trojan Horse or Prometheus giving humans fire—but those were wrong and involved too much murder and agony—so that left the Statue of Liberty. A gift an American audience would immediately recognize during the Super Bowl. Then, I just thought how funny it would be if people in that time period looked at gifts through the same lens people do today. And if they had a phone.”
In the commercial, France is bringing the Statue of Liberty to the United States by boat. The Americans are all in a room looking over the New York Harbor while one says, “Crap, that’s a really good gift.” Another says, “Now we have to get France something.” Then, they come up with the idea to use Etsy’s new gift mode, pulling out their phone and ordering a large, personalized cheese board. The commercial was directed by Andreas Nilsson.
For the Etsy project, Howell said, “We had discussed potentially including a celebrity, but when you tell a really funny joke well, you really don’t need a celebrity—and that’s exactly what we were doing in this spot.”
It was not a quick process to get to this point. After the initial briefing and script writing, the idea went through several weeks of creative development. Then the idea went through consumer research and testing. The team worked with Biscuit Filmworks, a production company based in London and New York.
Howell said, “We traveled to Bucharest, Romania, in December where we shot two spots, one of them being the Super Bowl ‘Thank you France’ spot, and the other being our ‘Cowgirl’ spot that ran during the AFC championship. After the new year, the team worked on post-production, editing, and making sure everything was ready to be seen by a wide audience. The campaign went live on February 1.”
Wells added, “Writing the spot is just one small part. You can do that in a night, right? But actually making the ad involves so much more than finding the words. You find the right actors, the right director, the right DP (director of photography), and later, the right editors, VFX people, and composers for post-production. Once you’re on set you’ve realized all the words crammed together one night have come to life thanks to the hundreds of people working behind the scenes, and it’s just very beautiful.”
Howell and Wells are both humble, saying they were a small part in this large process. When the big game finally aired on February 11, both were holding their breath, waiting for the project, they just spent so much time on, to air.
“Seeing it live was really great,” Howell said. “Patrick and I watched the game together with some of our close friends and it was really, really cool to see it at the moment that it aired during the Super Bowl. That was the ‘wow moment’. Our agency had just made this funny yet so relatable ad for the biggest game of the year, and we were a part of that.”
Wells said, “By the time it aired, I had seen it thousands of times in the edit. I’m just glad it made sense.”
Only five days after it aired on Sunday, the commercial already had nearly half a million views on Etsy’s YouTube page. Many at the watch party Howell and Wells attended laughed at the commercial and shared in the two’s success.
Both say this type of success didn’t come easy. It took years for them to create something that has now been seen by such a wide audience.
Wells said, “I think it’s a testament to a lot of persistence. It’s hard to get things made. There are a lot of things that aren’t going to go your way in this industry. I’ve worked on projects for a full year that were shelved and no one will ever see. I’ve been told the word ‘no’ millions of times, it feels. It’s probably annoying to have one more person tell you, ‘never give up.’ but unfortunately in advertising, it’s true.
This was the two’s first Super Bowl commercials they’ve worked on, and they say they would love to work on another one day; either way, they’ll keep pushing for that next big project. Howell’s advice to those hoping to reach their goals in the field is, “You have to be hungry and you have to be really detail-oriented. You also have to be persistent, as Patrick mentioned. This career choice takes time and dedication. You earn the experience in time, and you learn as much as you can from the incredibly smart individuals that surround you. And you listen, a lot.”
The two UT grads originally met at local advertising agency Tombras in Knoxville, where they both began their careers, but didn’t reconnect until they both moved to New York separately. Howell is from Franklin, Tennessee, and Wells is from Greenville, Tennessee.